Wouldn’t bother me, but what’s wrong with the floor? I don’t need to rack my brain questioning whether my SO would mind me sleeping in the same bed with someone if I just roll up a shirt and call it a night 
I have, plenty of times. Even went on a two week camping trip with a friend who is in a relationship. Her BF didn’t raise any objections, but she and I are very old friends who’ve camped together for years. On a backpacking trip you share tents, it’s just the way things go. I’m not carrying an extra tent because someone doesn’t want to violate their intimate space.
To me, this is a completely different situation. Camping and sharing a tent with someone who isn’t your SO doesn’t really match up with being in a house and sleeping fairly regularly in the same bed with somebody who isn’t your SO. It’s just not the same dynamic at all.
While I realize that you’ve been consistent in your commentary about doing this repeatedly, I think the other posters who are on the same side of the bed, as it were, with you are saying that they wouldn’t be comfortable with this happening even once. In that vein, I believe Telemark’s analogy is appropriate.
If those boundaries are well-established and each individual in the relationship respects the boundaries and each other, it is fairly rare occurrence that doing “whatever they please” would come in conflict with those boundaries.
How are they different? In one case, there is one tent, which gets shared. In the other, there is one bed, which gets shared. Heck, the tent is probably smaller then a king size bed anyway. To me, they are the same situation. To totally mix metaphors - Necessity makes strange bedfellows.
Am I correct in my assumption that possessiveness of bedspace (or maybe it’s a bed=sex thing) is fairly new, at least in European based society? I’ve often heard stories of whole families sharing a bed, of travellers sharing beds at inns, of beds being shared in royal households.
This, along with John Carter of Mars view is the one that makes the most sense to me.
If someone is coming into town to visit you, you are bound to ensure their arrangements for sleep and nourishment (unless they let you off the hook for doing so). The entire concept seems a little foreign to me on its’ face, it doesn’t make sense that there would be a need to be somewhere (other than, say, a disaster/disaster relief situation) where “anywhere you crash” is a suitable place to sleep.
That said, I don’t think I would have a huge problem with it if I knew the person. If I didn’t KNOW the person, I would not feel comfortable with it. Trust is a secondary issue in this case, at least to me.
I’ve been on plenty of backpacking trips, and I carry my own bivvy tent, which I set up, live in, and take down. If there are more than one of you on the trip and you only have one tent, and that tent rips, or gets otherwise damaged, whatcha gonna do? BTW, a bivvy tent only weighs between 5 and 7 lbs, and unless you’re trying to cover an insane amount of real estate on the trip, an additional 5lbs ain’t gonna kill ya.
Trust me, a backpacking tent is much smaller then a king sized bed, or a queen sized bed, or a double bed. You’re right next to each other at all times, often having to climb over one another to get in and out of the tent. To me (and clearly not to everyone) there’s no difference between sharing a tent and sleeping in the same bed. Sleeping logistics don’t rank high on my list of intimate concerns as long as I trust the person I’m with.
IMHO Unless both of you agree with that I’d say it is disrespecting to him, which is disrespecting the marriage and disrespecting yourself in the process.
This does not apply to emergency situations, where reasonable accommodations need to be made, like if your car broke down and there was no other reasonable option to stay elsewhere and there was no other place to sleep besides that bed.
I know. I have This one and if everyone has their own version of that one, no harm no foul. If one tent gets ripped, there’s still shelter (albeit snug) for both, and you’re presumably under your own blankets vs. sharing a sheet and blanket on a bed, so logistically there’s a considerable difference. Planning to go spend time in another person’s bed just seems a little hinky to me. More than anything IMO, I wouldn’t want to put that person out and/or subject them to my sleep indiosyncracies.
In India, where large families share households, and there are often visitors coming and going, there are often situations in which people are – even in their own homes – separated from their spouses during sleep times.
So people will often end up sleeping with a sibling, cousin, grandparent, etc. But there are definite limits – in no case would it be considered acceptable for two post-puberty, pre-reallyoldity people of opposite sexes who are not closely related by blood to end up in the same bed for the night.
Trust me, I’ve been in backpacking tents before - plenty of them. To me, it’s a completely different psychological dynamic. I’m interested in the head space with this, not the body space. Sleeping in a small tent with someone who’s not your SO, sleeping in a king bed with someone who’s not your SO – physically, there’s no difference.
But for me, psychologically, there’s a considerable difference. Sleeping in a tent with someone other than my SO because we can only carry a limited amount of equipment is essentially a survival technique, and blows away reservations I would otherwise have. Choosing to go to a friend’s house fairly regularly and sleep in his/her bed with him/her just isn’t the same dynamic.
I really don’t get very worked up about this at all, despite my mounting number of posts, but I guess you could say I have…I don’t know… intimate associations with bed at home that I don’t have at all with sleeping bag in small tent after slogging fifteen k through the Grand Erg Oriental.
It is fairly new. When staying at an inn in Colonial America the odds are excellent that not only would you share a room with a total stranger but you would also share the bed with one or more of them. Societal norms change though and I don’t think many people would find it acceptable to share a bed with someone they didn’t know. I don’t have any memories of sharing a room with my younger sister while I was growing up or sleeping in the same bed as my parents out of necessity. Protection from the boogey man, sure, but I always had my own bed to sleep in when the monsters weren’t prowling around.
Marc
Once a year = fairly regularly? I don’t know.
And I’m sorry, I just don’t think sleeping in a king-sized bed with someone who you never touch is all that intimate. It’s definitely not more intimate physically than a small tent. YMMV.
I’ve shared beds with friends of all genders and orientations and it’s never been an issue. When traveling and dealing with limited bed space, or visiting a friend, or you’re just all too drunk/tired to go home it’s nice to not get jumpy about sharing beds. I’d be completely fine with my SO sharing a bed with a friend under any of those circumstances.
But if my SO said he had a problem with it, I guess I’d accept that, though I’d think it was unwarranted. Sharing a bed just doesn’t strike me as a terribly intimate thing, though. Obviously everyone’s MMV.
It’s kind of strange to have a place that has a king size bed, and no other places for someone to sleep. I just can’t imagine not having a couch. Unless my place really was too small for one… but then I wouldn’t have a king size bed.
SO and I agree that as long as there’s clothing and no cuddling (and no exes), any permutation of orientations and genders is pretty much okay with us.
Cuddling in bed, and while sleeping, is an intimate activity I reserve for my relationship. Just plain sleeping? Eh. Whatever.
I might not be the one to answer this, but here goes anyway.
I wouldn’t care if my bf slept with another man, and had crazy wild sex until dawn. As long as he’s not getting diseases or babies, it’s fine.
He also trusted me to go on the Equality Ride for 2 months and sleep/ride on a bus with 30 other queers, but from his POV, it’s a monogamous relationship, so his trust there is more important than what I would think if he were with another man. (Note, this doesn’t mean I’m cheating on him, it simply means that I’d be fine with an open relationship, but he isn’t.)
This is a very large assumption.
We’re looking at this the wrong way, in third-person omniscient mode: A and B are married, C is gay, by definition. A sometimes sleeps with C. No problems are evident.
To get the perspective of B, we need to slip into first-person mode: “Honey, I’m going over to my friend’s house. I’m packing overnight stuff and I’m sleeping in his bed. Don’t worry, he says he’s gay.”
It could be completely true, as presented. Or the wife could be lying and the friend is really a long-term fuck buddy. Or the wife could be telling God’s truth: the friend did say he was gay, in order to get her into his bed. Who knows?
Personally: if I had met the guy and reason to agree he was gay, then I would have no problems with it. Then again, since I’ve had a kidney transplant and I am immunosuppressed, I wouldn’t be delighted that she’d be rolling in someone else’s bed in someone else’s house and bringing back their germs — I get sick very easily.
Hell no. My wife has some gay male friends, and while I completely trust her, and haven’t had a problem with her having a night out on the town, sleeping in their bed is a line-crosser and deal breaker. It would indicate to me a whole mess of problems if my wife even proposed that. Even though he’s gay, maybe she has the hots for him? Is this a chance to get closer than normal? Fly close to a fantasy of hers? If the circumstances where as such she couldn’t get home and there was no other place to sleep, well, it just smacks of a set up, because most people, if they needed to could improvise… blankets/pillow on the floor for instance. There’s just something very Michael Jackson-y about it. And it would force my suspicion to trump my trust in her. I’d need a lot of convincing. :dubious: